


your love is my turning page (every kiss is a cursive line)

by dejaboo (cosmicbluebells)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Astronomy, Character Study, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Not Beta Read, Not Canon Compliant, Self-Indulgent, excessive usage of space metaphors, jaemin is a cynic, kind of, renjun is a space cadet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24739402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicbluebells/pseuds/dejaboo
Summary: When Renjun gets caught up in fantastical worlds and cities in the sky, Jaemin will always be there to anchor him back down to the ground.Alternatively: Renjun has a head full of dreams and eyes glittering with stars. Jaemin is made up of bright smiles and endless cynicism bundled up into a neat, coffee-fueled package. They make it work, somehow.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Na Jaemin
Comments: 10
Kudos: 42





	your love is my turning page (every kiss is a cursive line)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "Turning Page" by Sleeping At Last. Not beta-read (quickly edited) so if you see any grammar/spelling mistakes just pretend they aren't there. Loosely inspired (?) by the webtoon Always Human for the setting of Renjun's art. This oneshot is entirely self-indulgent because I wanted to write domestic Renmin, but you write what you want to read, huh?

Despite all his biting sarcasm and sharply pragmatic remarks, Renjun is a dreamer at heart. He loses himself in flowing brushstrokes and cities in the sky painted with watercolour. Some days he’ll spend hours in the studio just wandering in his own head, exploring every new step with another scene straight out of his imagination.

Renjun likes to draw impossible things - bustling metropolises floating on clouds, golden-eyed residents with hair every colour of the rainbow and electric skyscrapers reaching up, up, towards the stars. He thinks that if he closes his eyes hard enough it’s as if he’s there and not sitting on a paint-stained stool gripping yesterday’s mug of cold tea in his slender fingers. 

When he was younger he would stargaze on the roof of his old house, dragging a sleeping bag up the attic stairs and studying the constellations, the only sound the beat of his heart. Even now he likes to step outside the apartment building at nighttime and lean his head against the fire escape, barely able to tear his eyes away from the midnight sky long enough to catch a few hours of sleep before the sun rises to wake him again.

The sky isn’t home, but that’s what he likes about it. It’s foreign yet familiar, slipping out of memory’s reach and hugging every curve of his heart like a well-worn sweater.

Renjun used to dream of being an astronaut, to traverse the galaxy and see the stars up close. He can remember watching the moon landing on his grandpa’s old TV more than thirty years after it happened, the video filled with static and the audio more crackly than pop rocks. 

But even without a high-resolution flat-screen display, he still felt as if it might be him stepping on the moon someday. When his other classmates moved onto other dreams, more realistic plans for the future, he couldn’t help but wonder if he would ever find anything else to set his heart on.

Then he found art. He found blank canvases and watery pastels, swooshing black ink strokes that could map out everything and anything he wanted them to. It’s a strange, dissonant sort of dichotomy - his blunt nature and thinly-veiled bitterness that everyone knows him for at odds with a constant yearning for the moon and more. But it works for him.

Now he knows that flying across the universe means nothing when there’s no one you love beside you to appreciate it, and stars up-close are nothing more than balls of fire. So he settles for painting by the light of the moon he once wanted to step foot on, with someone he loves more than anything right next door and the stars blinking diamond-bright so close he could practically touch them.

Nowadays he’s established a fine balancing act, spending long enough on taxes and bills and grocery shopping for the burden of real-world responsibility to follow him around all day like a lead-ball weight, but still dedicating most of his time to stargazing and painting whatever comes to mind.

And no matter where he goes, Renjun is sure that his dreamt-up paintings and uninhibited, rough ink sketches will always lead him right back to the stars.

☾

Jaemin is a logician with a deceptively carefree exterior. His demeanour is built on bright, spontaneous smiles and exuberance, but underneath his wild attitude lies a brain that constantly works overtime to make predictions and, if possible, find an equation to explain away phenomena of all kinds. He isn’t quite sure what he wants from life - he’s too meticulous and planned for anything overly adventurous while he misses out on social interaction when he’s stuck entering data and calculating formulas.

If there’s a way to hypothesize an event’s outcome, extrapolate data, discover the missing variable, Jaemin will use it. He doesn’t know how not to. It’s second nature for him to think of what might happen next with all negative possibilities factored in, and when you spend so much time thinking about the probability of something going wrong as opposed to everything going right, it’s hard not to impart the same view on your future.

So as soon as he tries to imagine what he might be doing two years from now his mind draws a blank, switches off, immediately shoves every possible negative result to the forefront of his brain and forces him to give up on imagining altogether. Instead, he fixates on the step just ahead, trains his eyes on his feet instead of staring off into the horizon. He’s been living like this for so long that dreams don’t come naturally - or they wouldn’t if he could close his eyes at night and let his mind rest.

It isn’t a bad way to live, no matter how stiff and exhausting it might sound. He’s prepared for every disappointment that might arise, he never has to “roll with the punches,” so to speak, because he already knows the probability of the punches coming and has discouraged himself from getting hopes up too high. 

It tires out his brain but he can’t stop thinking about it long enough to fall asleep. So he finds an alternative: coffee, and a lot of it. Something that can keep up with his brain’s hyperactivity and still leave room for other tasks, the bitterness a welcome addition to the bland flavour of everyday life. It’s enough variation for him, at least.

When Jaemin was a child he learned that no one appreciates being told how unlikely it is for them to become a world-famous singer. He finds it nice that other people have dreams for their eventual career paths but back then, he supposed that it would be better to pour them over the head with the cold water of reality than let them down slowly.

It led to dirty looks from other kids and cries from whoever he was talking to and Jaemin protesting helplessly that he just wanted to teach them something. Now he keeps his mouth shut and tries his best to entertain other peoples’ fantasies about the future despite the lack of expectations for his own.

Jaemin lives in a constant cycle of coffee-charged morning runs and to-do lists, filing taxes and drafting credit-card statements while music pipes out of his phone speakers, not too loud as to disturb other people. He texts his friends every day, goes to his job as a teaching assistant that will likely never result in a teaching career, and comes back in the afternoon early enough to cook up something for dinner.

It’s boring, but he’s okay with that, if only because he always knows what will happen next.

☾

On any given day, Jaemin is up before the sun. He usually spends the night staring at the ceiling until a comforting figure finally crawls into bed next to him, and the reassuring warmth always relaxes him enough to get an hour or two of sleep.

When he wakes up, he turns over in bed to whisper half-coherent teases into Renjun’s ear - and is inevitably kicked away by the still-asleep boy who mumbles that his breath smells like coffee while buried deep in a mountain of pillows. 

The morning is Jaemin’s favourite part of the day and he savours it for as long as possible. Minutes tick away on the clock while he snuggles with Renjun, playing with his fingers or running a hand through his ruffled hair.

Jaemin likes to pepper a few quick kisses on Renjun’s cheeks before getting out of bed to brew his morning coffee. At this point he’ll flick through the morning news on his phone or busy himself with cleaning up the kitchen, rinsing off Renjun’s dinner plate from yesterday that’s been placed outside the studio door and putting it in the dishwasher. 

His day at work isn’t exactly monotonous, but he’s excited nonetheless when his daily text pops up at lunchtime. Renjun likes to send him photos of what he’s working on and they’re so free, so unrestrained, so purely  _ Renjun _ that Jaemin wants to be hopeful about the future. He’s working towards letting go of his innate cynicism, but right now he’s okay with being the grounding anchor while Renjun reaches endlessly for the sky.

As soon as he gets home from work, he changes out of his work clothes and starts looking through the cupboards to see what he can put together for dinner. Renjun goes grocery shopping a few times a week while Jaemin is in charge of cooking. While the food is in the oven or simmering on the stove, he sits at the dinner table to fill out paperwork, listening to some softer pop music (whatever is in his recommendations, usually) and sipping another cup of coffee.

His second-favourite part of the day is when he finally gets to put all the bills and paperwork away and step into Renjun’s studio.

Jaemin always feels out of place in the studio. It ostracizes him to the point that he feels uncertain about whether or not he should be there, but it’s where Renjun feels most at home. 

Every single brush scattered on the side table and swirling cloud on the sky mural taking up a whole wall embodies him completely. So Jaemin ignores the feeling of estrangement and laces his arms around Renjun’s neck, breathing in the scent of his shampoo.

Renjun will shake out of his reverie and turn around to kiss him, brushing noses and usually smearing some paint on Jaemin’s cheek. They sit together for an hour, sometimes more, just talking about whatever’s on their mind. 

Jaemin mentions the special needs kids he’s tutoring at school and the funny TV show he heard about from his friends. Renjun rambles on about the latest space discovery and the planned trip to Mars, as well as some new products he saw on the website from the art store they like to visit on the weekend. 

Jaemin smiles and nods, resisting the urge to point out the probability of the space trip happening in their lifetime because that’s not what Renjun needs. Jaemin knows that he needs to be reminded that there’s someone still listening. He recognizes that faraway look in Renjun’s eyes - like he keeps wandering off the face of the earth by accident. It’s Jaemin’s job to bring him back again.

He eats dinner by himself when Renjun’s creative juices are flowing and he’s dreaming up the most fantastical things. He leaves a plate on the table with a covering over it to keep the food warm and turns in for the night.

He goes to bed with his mind still whirling from the day and waits it out, listening to his breath even out and the ceiling fan spin until the other side of the bed isn’t cold anymore.

☾

Renjun’s day starts mid-morning, hours after Jaemin has left. Even at nighttime his imagination can’t help but go to new places, and he wakes up brimming with inspiration for a new art piece. He eats cereal for breakfast while writing down his ideas or quickly sketching the world in his dream.

After breakfast, he heads to the grocery store and buys all the essentials. It makes him feel more domestic than anything else, the mere act of buying food for the week something to be romanticized. He whips up something small for lunch, usually a sandwich unless he’s feeling lazy (in which case pizza delivery is in order), and immediately walks into the studio.

Everything from the smell down to the squeaking sound his shoes make on the ground is familiar and comforting. He works in silence most of the time or pokes in a pair of earbuds to get rid of the background noise, cars honking their horns or the screech of wheels on asphalt from people in a hurry.

He closes his eyes and an image rises to his mind immediately, unbidden. He would never see it in real life, but that’s the nice part about it - he can dream up whatever he wants to, not worrying about the constraints of gravity or practicality that so often weigh down everyday decisions. 

When he starts to consider the real-world issues arising within his dreamt-up cities, Renjun always thinks about Jaemin saying how difficult it would be to build that, or the multitude of reasons why it wouldn’t work, and smiles. His sensibility is endearing in so many ways and reminds Renjun that real life has more rules than his imagination. 

Renjun still encourages people to follow their dreams and hates to crush their hopes, but he does so with a conscious effort not to completely dismiss reality’s restrictions - regardless of how many of those rules his art pieces ignore.

No matter how many times it’s happened, he’s always hyper-aware of Jaemin coming home from the footsteps and little sounds he makes - humming under his breath while he cooks, clicking his pen as he writes down numbers, tapping his foot in a one-two step rhythm if the food is too spicy for his liking.

Renjun brings himself back down to earth early enough that when Jaemin walks through the studio door he isn’t caught distracted and faraway. He likes to fiddle with the sleeves of his sweater or twirl an ink pen between his hands while chattering on and on, if only to stop him from drifting back into his own head.

Jaemin is the touchier of the two, constantly placing butterfly kisses on Renjun’s nose or coming up to give him back hugs. Renjun expresses his affection the only way he knows how - art. He takes pictures of his favourite pieces and sends them to Jaemin, hoping his message will come across by care of broad brushstrokes and silvery painted stars.

When his fingers ache from carrying brushes, his glass of water muddy with paint of all colours, Renjun hangs up his apron and looks up to the stars. Sometimes they’re crystal-clear; sometimes the city smog and clouds of pollution have drifted far enough out of the city to take over their small corner of the atmosphere.

The sky is already lightening to a pale golden when he gets dressed and snuggles under the covers. He can hear Jaemin breathing, knows that he’s waiting for him - and Renjun squeezes their intertwined hands tightly as if to say, “I’m here.”

Jaemin rolls over in bed and kisses his forehead gently.

When Renjun gets caught up in fantastical worlds and cities in the sky, Jaemin will always be there to anchor him back down to the ground.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked it! Please kudos/comment if you did, concrit is highly appreciated :)


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